This is a student film I created while I was in VanArts. It was extremely fun and laborious, I usually spent at least 12 hours a day at school learning and working on my film. Surprisingly, I had fun throughout the whole process with the exception of pre-visualizing. I just couldn't come up an "acceptable" story/characters.

This is where I'd like to give a special thanks to Alannah Mayes for being a great friend and helping me come up with the building stones that has become "Sleeping Dragon".

Unlike the rest of my class, I had an extremely fun time constructing the set. Though some details (like the roofing) were left out do to having time constraints, I loved it. It came up to a total of about 4 million triangles if I remember correctly, even with the roofs not being complete, luckily I was able to shrink it down to less than 2 million with some polygon deletions. On a side note, I still wish the well was in the middle of the courtyard, I think it would've brought a greater majesty to it. The reason I decided to veto the well in the middle was because it would be in the way for a lot of the shots.

The modeling and the rigging of the characters weren't a problem for me either, I understood the majority of what I was doing (though I wouldn't be able to explain what I was doing if you asked me), and got results that I was fairly happy with.

Animating, this part was even more fun! I saw animating it like choreographing a dance, with twirls and flows with each part of the body to creating something beautiful, creating life.

After school I wanted to submit this film into a few festivals, sadly a majority of them wanted me to submit films in the format of a literal "reel". Which seems like an odd thing to do if I have a digital format... So after my film was turned down for the ones I applied to, I decided to place it up here on dA, for it's first "world-wide release".

I had an incredible time at VanArts, my classmates were probably the best people I have ever met, and I hope that we'll see each other again in the future.Here are their dA pages that I know of:

Well in truth you can pretty much get the same (if not better) outcomes with much cheaper programs, it's just that the industry standard are in-house engines or maya. I dabbled with XSI which was neat, but because I've been experimenting with maya before I learned XSI I had an easier time with it than the latter. (Which is why I prefer maya).

You could try the personal learning edition of maya (if they still have it) and blender (which is free) and see that the basics are pretty much the same, it's just that the interface is pretty much the "big" difference.

I use Blender. Its amazing what Blender is capable of; Ive never seen such a powerful open-source modeling program! I think Ill just stick with blender... I'm already familiar with it, its free, and it can do a LOT. Thanks for the advice!

@02:12Great little movie you have here! How long did it take for you to make it? What software did you use? This was a pretty creative movie and I really liked the concept. Your character animation is smooth and it's just all around well done.

It took me 6 months in school to make it (3 for preproduction [storyboard/ character designs], 3 for animation), and 1 more month for the finishing touches. I used Maya for the film as well as Adobe After Effects for compositing the film and creating the color effect.